Can You Save Money By Switching Your Mobile Phone Provider?

My phone was starting to show its age as they often do, so I wondered if it was at all possible to save money by switching mobile phone providers at the same time as purchasing a new phone.

If you’re wondering, in my case the answer was a resounding yes.

We had been seeing those Mint Mobile Ads with Ryan Reynolds all over the place and decided to do a little digging on the company. We checked out online reviews which looked good and verified that the coverage in our area was good. With Black Friday coming up at the time, I waited to see if there were any deals.(Also wanted to note that our goal was to only use one mobile service instead of the multiple service providers we currently used).

Signing up for Mint Mobile

As luck would have it, Mint Mobile was having a good deal on the recently released Pixel 6A which, according to reviews, was improving with each update Google was releasing. Mint Mobile was having a “buy 6 months get 6 months of free service” deal when purchasing a new phone for all their plans. The ability to get 6 months of free service was too good an offer to pass up.

I briefly chatted with Mint Mobile online chat which was very helpful about how to switch my provider, and their online help had some videos which showed the process. (For those who do not know, Mint Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that provides access to T-Mobile’s cellular network, including 5G).

I ran some numbers on our current service providers, and the savings were several hundreds dollars. In addition, we would own two new Pixel 6A phones outright, and would be getting 6 months of free service for each phone. We went ahead and purchased 2 Pixel 6a phones Mint Mobile which arrived in just over a week.

Activating my Mint Mobile Service

I would be activating my new phone and porting over my existing number. For this, you need to make sure your current service is still activated. Mint Mobile‘s online guide walked me though the setup process letting me know I needed the following from my current service which I found all the information when logging into my current provider:

• The account number on your bill
• Password or PIN
• Your phone’s ESN/IMEI number

I used a Mint Mobile online chat representative and they walked me though moving everything from my old phone to my new phone, installing the new Sim card, porting the number to my new phone, etc

It was a very painless process, taking about 10 minutes to setup my new Mint Mobile account and provide all the information from my current account to port over my number to the new phone. The representative let me know it might take 24 hours for the number to port over to the new phone. In my case, the number worked within 10 minutes after the device was setup!

Upsides of Mint Mobile

• No contracts
• Was easy to switch and get the new phone setup
• Family plans for managing multiple phones
• App and website ran so well, much better then our existing plans
• Mint’s phone came unlocked
• Easy to add additional data if your using one of their small usage plans

Downsides of Mint Mobile

• As Mint Mobile mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), you can run into issues if you are connecting to T-Mobile mobile network. If the current network is saturated MVNO users end up being slowed down in favor of regular users to T-Mobiles network.
• Family plans have no discounts, even though it’s easy to manage multiple lines
• Issues with default MMS messages not working properly**

(**Mint Mobile knew right away about this issue, about 5 minutes later it was fixed by adding a new “Access Point Name” to the phone. )

Conclusion

Spend some time looking at other phone Mobile Network options, especially if your looking for a new phone. I probably spent a few hours looking at many plans, phones and reviews but saving hundreds of dollars and at the same time getting new phones was well worth it in in the end.